Listening to Old Wives Tales - Draft

DRAFT FOR COMMENT presented at IPDA 2014

Listening to old wives tales: small stories as the stuff of professional

learning

Corresponding author: Alex Kendall, Birmingham City University

[email protected]

Authors: Melanie Gibson, Clare Himsworth, Kirsty Palmer, Helen Perkins

Abstract

In this paper we share the outcomes of an HEA funded project to take up

Nutbrown’s challenge to “push out from the safe(er) boundaries of established

methodologies” (2011:241) in Early Years research to explore the value of auto-

ethnography and the telling of small stories, what Lyotard calls ‘petit récit’ (Lyotard,

1979), to the processes of doing and learning about research in the context of

professional learning in the Early Years. We offer a rationale for the use of creative

methods in professional learning and describe the process of working with identity

boxes and symbolic objects, to produce a collection of auto-ethnographic narratives,

the old wives tales of the title, through which to explore practitioners’ experiences of

professional identity formation. We go on to consider the opportunities these

methods, which facilitate a dual identity of researcher and participant, offer for

reflexive learning about practitioner positionality within the knowledge-making

practices of Early Years professional education. Towards a conclusion we reflect

upon and theorise about, the meanings that participant-researchers make about

their career trajectories and make the case for auto-ethnography and para-

ethnography as useful pedagogic modalities for dynamic and reflexive professional

learning in the Early Years specifically and the professions more widely. We mobilise

Patti Lather’s notion of methodological proliferation to re-think professionalism as a

wild profusion of possibilities.

November 27th 2013 1

Introduction

This paper represents an attempt to re-think the work of professional education and

the becoming professional in ways that seek to trouble discursive constructions of

early years work and early years workers and ‘constitute friction in the molar

machine’ (Massumi: 1992:06) of conventional, policy dominated curricula, what we

might call after Deleuze striated spaces territorialised by state apparatus. We discuss

work undertaken for an HEA funded project through which we sought to take up

Nutbrown’s challenge to “push out from the safe(er) boundaries of established

methodologies” (2011:241) in Early Years research.

The project, which brought together colleagues from a higher education institution

and a further education institution in the Midlands of England to work with students

on a Foundation Degree (FdA) programme, sought to achieve a number of

concurrent and entangled intentions: to enable undergraduate students studying in

an HE in FE setting to play with research approaches/methods that move beyond the

orthodox qualitative paradigms that tend to characterise undergraduate research

programmes in the social sciences and push out instead towards (or as the Deleuze

would have it would have it ‘plug in’ to the) ‘post’ ontologies/methodologies; to

engage students simultaneously in a piece of ‘real’ collaborative research about

becoming a degree level Early Years Practitioner and in so doing to (re)position them

newly in relation to the epistemologies of their field of study, Early Years Education

(EYE).

Here we share the project and its context, a description of an assemblage of

“empirical material” (after St Pierre, 2013) about becomings that we amassed

(noticed, read, made, collected, curated) and our readings and re-readings of our

material through the competing lenses of established frames in the literature. How,

we wondered, did our material talk back to a literature within which the voices of

early years workers as ‘participants’ are, as St Pierre would have it (2013) often

“represented on a golden platter for readers” and largely absent from any

interpretive frame. In addition to resisting the traditional orthodoxies of voice that


imply a centred human(ist) subject we challenge what MaClure calls the “panoptic

immunity” of the researcher as “liberal subject who is entitled to interrogate and

dissect the lives and business of others while preserving the privacy, intactness and

autonomy of his (or her) own ‘secret self’ (Miller 1988:162)” (MaClure 2013:168).

We go on to argue that the discussions of the positionality of early years teacher as

embodied subjects inhabiting striated spaces of class, gender and labour markets

that dominate the literature serve to fix, contain and bind our understanding

through the kind of arborescent logic that Deleuze and Guattari describe (2010). We

make the case instead for rhizomic narrativisations that take up the threads of little

stories, something like Lyotard’s ‘petits ecrits’ perhaps, of becoming an early years

worker. In doing so we pay attention to the “entanglements of language, matter,

words and things” (Maclure 2013:171) and move towards altogether different ways

of thinking that open up new possibilities for professional education as a space

where epistemologies and ontologies are made rather than learned. Towards a

conclusion we make the case for professional education as an assemblage, a

“process of making and unmaking” (Jackson and Mazzei 2013:3) within which the

material as well as the discursive are implicated. This demands, we suggest, new

pedagogies, pedagogies of profusion perhaps, akin to Lather’s methodological call,

(2006) that enable disruption of legitimate, or what Deleuze and Guattari might call

molar, forms of professional knowledge and facilitate instead the plugging in of

alternative theoretical perspectives to think through with theory (Jackson and

Mazzei, 2013) the dilemmas of the professional field. Towards concluding we argue

that professional education must deny the ‘nowhere’ of the neophyte practitioner in

relation to context and facilitate recognition and exploration of an always already

entanglement with the professional field.

Project overview

The project that ignited this work was funded by the HEA Research Methods in the

Social Sciences funding call and brought together teachers from social science

disciplines at a modern university in the Midlands and a large general further

education college in the West Midands to create a reflexive research methods

curriculum using innovative and creative research processes as a dynamic medium


for teaching research methods. The project team was keen to recontextualise

strategies that one team member had put to work on postgraduate and professional

doctorate (EdD) programmes to stimulate thinking in the post-structuralist frame, on

the basis that undergraduate research in the ‘soft’ social sciences tends to be

informed by more orthodox qualitative approaches that have their origins in a

humanist, structuralist position.

Designed specifically to support education practitioners (across the phases) who are

new to research the approach draws on auto-ethnographic, investigative approaches

to pedagogy developed by project team members (Bennett, Kendall & McDougall

2012). This approach engages the student in a reflexive approach to data production,

including visual and sensory approaches after Pink (2007, 2009), analysis and

presentation activities to position themselves epistemologically and ontologically in

relation to their field of study. This means that students learn through doing, rather

than simply learning about research methods as a set of abstracted concepts. As

such learning is embodied, experiential and entangled and the often nearest to hand

metaphors of the detached, objective researcher, Usher and Scott’s (1996) ‘Naïve

Postivist’, operating within a value-free social science problematised.

This approach facilitates easy access to ‘primary data’, or what we might want to call

in resistance to the scientific, ‘empirical material’ (after St Pierre, 2013), for novice

researchers since the focus of enquiry is their own entanglement, and that of their

peers and tutors, within the field of study. This then opens opportunities for tutors

and students to co-construct and experiment with meanings around identities,

purpose and processes. As such it has the potential to explore concepts of ‘self’ and

others through collaborative learning that enhances social and cultural

understanding. Research skills, such as writing development are organically

embedded in the process as the production of early personal narratives liberates

new researchers from impersonal, academic forms of writing (Nash, 2004) enabling

them to build confidence as they, reflexively, explore conceptualisation of academic

voice. Through an on-going process of reflection and refinement this approach helps

students and tutors expand their understanding of qualitative research, using visual


and textual methods in a way that is practical, accessible, creative and innovative. At

the same time through the on-going sharing of the texts, artefacts and writings they

produce students are constructed/construct themselves as novice researchers

through their interaction with the complex processes and dynamics of peer review in

the social sciences.

Plugging-in

We worked with a group students in the final year, of an FdA in Early Childhood

Studies (ECS). Foundation Degrees are two year vocationally orientated programmes

introduced in the United Kingdom in 2000. FdAs in ECS formed an important part of

the former New Labour government’s strategy for workforce development and the

‘responsiveness’ of higher education institutions to the needs of early years

employees and employers. Though universities develop and deliver FdAs, often with

further education college partners, these qualifications are increasingly subject to

regulatory standards owned by and implemented through a government funded

quango, the Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC).

Two of us, Alex and Helen, collaborated to develop a two-week programme, mapped

in to the Research Methods module students were following on their FdA, designed

to plug the group in to new ways of thinking, doing and being with research. We

introduced the idea that learning about research would be experiential and

structured around a piece of collaborative research about becoming an early years

practitioner. We explored the idea of turning research in on ‘ourselves’ as

students/subjects always already entangled in practice and ‘becoming’ and auto-

ethnography as a strategy for the production of empirical material.

A qualification of how we want auto-ethnography to mean in this context is

important here. We turn in on itself the criticism from writers like Delamont (2007)

that auto-ethnography is too experiential, cannot fight familiarity, and that it focuses

on the wrong side of the power divide (2007: 3) and instead positively embrace

these characteristics as driving motivations for putting it to work. Auto-ethnography

here is mobilised as an act of subjective story-telling through which the student


constructs an autobiographical personal narrative – ‘a petit récit ’. This narrative is

not understood to be ‘truthful’ in any totalising sense but is of interest because it

represents a temporary projection or moment of textualised identity. Taking post-

structuralist notions of ‘self’ as a starting point where ‘self identity is bound up with

a capacity to keep a particular narrative going’ (Gauntlett, 1991: 54) these narratives

articulate the expressed trajectories of ‘individual identities’ in relation to the

possible textual field. What is important here is not the realities or truth of

experience or action but the process, the selection and mobilisation of particular

discursive positions to do particular sorts of identity work.

Through our discussion of auto-ethnography we opened up and expanded

definitions of what might be ‘counted’ as data and the curatorial, productive role of

the researcher as an agent of, rather than conduit or receptacle for, meaning making

and taking. We would we suggested: make objects; tell stories; listen to stories;

discuss our object and story making; curate and share symbolic objects; take pictures

and audio recordings; and discuss our thoughts and feelings uninhibited by research

conventions, interviews, structure or systematisation, along the way. We would

‘count’ all of this as empirical material offering ways in to grappling with our own

entanglement.

We read Nutbrown’s (2012) A Box of Childhood: small stories at the roots of a career

and explored the work of a range of academics and practitioners that plays self-

consciously/reflexively with issues of identity and representation: Kelly Clarke-

Keefe’s on visual arts, poetics and subjectivities (2008); David Gauntlett’s (2006)

work on the use of ‘identity boxes’; Bonnie Soroke’s (2004) ‘zipper’ workshops; and

Kendall’s work (Bennett et al 2011) on the use of artefacts in professional education.

We then held two workshop sessions. In the first the group produced and shared

identity boxes to explore their trajectory towards the FdA programme and becoming

an academic.


This was followed by face-to-face discussion about conceptualising and doing

research and being researched which was followed up by further discussion on the

(pre-existing) group blog. In the second workshop students chose symbolic objects

around/through which to assemble their own stories of/about becoming a

practitioner.

Again this was followed by face-to-face reflection and discussion and a consideration

of how these methods could be put to work in the project proposals they were

producing for their module assessment and the projects they would go on to do in

the BA ‘top up’ most were going on to complete.

The final ‘writing about stage’ of the project was voluntary and an open invitation

was issued to students and teachers to come together to ‘plug-in’ theory to the

amassed empirical material. We want our ‘writing about’ to run counter to notions

of ‘writing up’ and to be homologous with the theoretical milieu from which the

project was imagined, that is to say we hope it is exploratory rather than


representational. We contest the conventions of ‘writing up’, the ‘the static writing

model’ criticised by Richardson 2001:924). Richardson locates this model within a

viridicular truth discourse; ‘given to science [in the 19th century] was the belief that

its words were objective, precise, unambiguous, noncontextual, and nonmetaphoric’

(ibid. 924/5). Within this model writing is not only conceived but practised in very

particular ways ‘I was taught, however, as you were too, not to write until I knew

what I wanted to say, until my points were organised and outlined’ (ibid. 924). She

goes on to argue:

No surprise that this static writing model coheres with mechanistic scientism

and quantitative research. I will argue that the static writing model is itself a

socio-historical invention that reifies the static world imagined by our 19th-

century foreparents…. The model has serious problems: it ignores the role of

writing as a dynamic, creative process; it undermines the confidence of

beginning qualitative researchers because their experience of research is

inconsistent with this writing model; and it contributes to the flotilla of

qualitative writing that is simply not interesting to read because adherence to

the model requires writers to silence their own voices and to view themselves

as contaminants. Social scientific writing, like all other forms of writing, is a

sociohistorical construction, and, therefore, mutable…(ibid. 924)

Rather a description is a ‘gloss’, “a typification of the presumed meaning of such

events” (Stanley 1993:214). Such understandings conceive a ‘crisis of representation’

(Beach 2001) in which ‘writing about’ is necessarily and inevitably a complex,

arbitrary, subjective, and partial, practice that works not to describe the ‘real’ but

rather to “police, produce, and constitute a field” (Lather 1999: 5) in these terms we

recognise that writing about research is “not representing the world but writing it”

(Usher, 1997:33) and researchers are, like literary writers, “world-makers” (ibid.

p35). We approach our writing very much as othered to this account of scientific

representational writing, using our writing and thinking with writing as an

opportunity to find ways in to our empirical material that affect us. We write instead

like Richardson “I write because I want to find out. I write in order to learn


something that I did not know before I wrote it” (ibid. 924).

We borrow Jackson and Mazzei’s (2012) reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s (2000)

notion of ‘plugging in’ to think through a self-conscious attention to working with/in

theory. In A Thousand Plateaus Delueze and Guattari (2000) write “when one writes,

the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into,

must be plugged into in order to work” (2000, 4). Jackson and Mazzei mobilise this

notion of plugging-in “as a process rather than a concept” (2012: 1) a putting to work

to produce something new. Foucault urges us to use his ideas like

…little tool boxes. If people want to open them, or to use this sentence or

that idea as a screwdriver or spanner to short-circuit, discredit or smash

systems of power, including eventually those from which my books have

emerged…so much the better (Foucault (1975) interview with Roger pol Driot

in M. Morris and P. Patton Michele Foucault: Power Truth Strategy).

Similarly Massumi recognises a similar invitation from Deleuze and Guattari to “lift a

dynamism” (Massumi, 1992:8) out of their work and put their concepts to work as a

‘tool box’ so as to “pack a potential in the way a crowbar in a willing hand envelops

an energy of prying” (ibid). In what follows we plug in ideas from a number of

theorists in ways that have enabled us to grapple with our own entanglement and to

problematise and re-think the processes of professional education. We seek not

resolution in our promiscuous play with theory but revolution (Massumi: 1992:8).

On pronouns – the ‘we’ and ‘us’ and the ‘we and the ‘us’ that write

The ‘we’ and the ‘us’ of this paper is multiple and various and ‘we’ ‘each’ are bound

and committed to its content in various and perhaps competing ways. It is possible

that it is not a ‘truth’ or ‘truthful’ for any or all of us and we don’t force it to become

this, instead it is something like a composite representation of our conversation,

something like a bricolage an assemblage perhaps? ‘We’, purposely and self-

consciously have not made distinctions between the ‘us’ of writing and the ‘us’ of


telling, producing, making and resisting the bounded notion of five discrete authors

as the point of origin of this paper. Instead we write in/to the flow of our – we, us,

them – entanglement with the field of study.

…the ‘self’ that writes this is neither the constant rationalist nor the

presenter of a totalising narrative. (Rhedding-Jones, 1997: 197)

one must take responsibility for inventing or producing one’s own self

(Foucault 1984: 39)

Who are we as a group of writers? There is self-consciously no ‘I’ in this paper. Like

Jackson we refuse a “ narrative ‘I’ – or the molar ‘I’ – that is expected to give a full

representation for the listener to easily consume and comprehend; the narrative or

molar ‘I’ tricks readers into thinking that they have the full picture.” (Jackson,

2010:584). We recognise Foucault’s notion of the author functioning as an

“ideological product: the functional principle by which in our culture one limits,

excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free

manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition…In fact, we

are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual sign of

invention” (Foucault, 1991: 119). We are ‘we’ in the multiple, plural and duplicitous

sense, “…each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd” (Deleuze and

Guattari: 2000:3), perhaps what Jackson calls a ‘becoming-I’ (Jackson 2010). We keep

our names as Deleuze and Guattari do, “out of habit, purely out of habit. To make

ourselves unrecog-nizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what

makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say

the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking” (2000:3). We

use the academic convention of positioning ourselves alphabetically knowingly/with

intent/affectively and metaphorically to flatten out our relations with production and

to draw attention instead to our conversation as a dynamic, productive place/space

charged with our collective grappling as we folded in and out. Folding (need to say

more here on folding and flattening from Jackson and Mazzei)


We are purposeful in our choice of folding and flattening to describe our

methodological practice that rejects the intepretivist stance and that

embraces the mutually constitutive nature of which Barad writes. The ‘intra-

action’ that characterized our process was made of re-considering the mutual

constitution of meaning as happening between researcher/researched;

data/theory; and inside/outside. The data and theory are folded into one

another whereby this process results in a ‘new inside/outside’ (2012:11)

We introduce ourselves in a ‘manner of speaking’ only and resist the notion that our

backstories provide a beginning or starting point for our analysis (Jackson and

Mazzei, 2012). Clare and Melanie were students in the group but have dual roles in

the college as a lecturer and assessor respectively working on National Qualifications

Framework level 3 courses. Both also have experience in practice-based settings.

Kirsty graduated from an ESC degree a year ago and is a newly qualified teacher of

the FdA. Helen is Head of Early Years Education (EYE) at the college within which the

work took place, is studying towards a Doctorate in Education and has a background

as a practitioner. Alex is a university professor with a background in teacher

education and practice experience in further education. In our diffused/varied ways

we are all always already entangled with the field of professional education, none of

us ‘more’ or ‘less’ but simply in difference, as St Pierre contends “we are none of us

nowhere, there is no nowhere, you are always already somewhere and your job is to

figure out where to go.” (St Pierre, 2013b). This paper shares something of that

figuring out toward St Pierre’s challenge to “forget and refuse” to create new

descriptions and “new concepts in our conversations” (2013a).

Likewise it’s important to make clear that this piece may or may not function as a

resolved narrative for each or any of us.


Poking Around

We make use of Jackson and Mazzei’s (2012) notion of “poking around in the

literature” to resist grandiose, totalising and reductive accounts of the work of the

‘literature review’ as impartial and systematic. In structuralist approaches to

research training students are encouraged to think about a variety of things: how to

‘search’ for literature; how to record and reflect upon findings; how to take a critical

approach to the work read; and how to ensure that sourced work and ideas are

referenced accurately and appropriately. What they are generally not taught is how

the ‘discourse’ of the literature review operates. That is to say the ways in which a

literature review is seen to ‘authorise’ the arguments and ideas which it

contextualises and to which it plays ‘host’. The literature review is used as a

mechanism for imparting ‘authority’ and ‘validity’ and its partiality is always

unspoken and un-explored. Whilst it seeks to stand in for/capture the ‘real’ or truth

of ‘the field’ instead it “police[s], produce[s], and constitute[s] a field” (Lather 1999:

5). Here then we use ‘poking around’ to draw attention to the always, already

partiality of ‘reviewing the literature’. Instead we engage with literature as part of

our assemblage of empirical material and bring together a discussion of the ‘hot

spots’ (Maclure 2013: 172) in our readings. That is to say moments of recognition,

“movement, singularity, emergence” (ibid 171) “gut feelings [that] point to the

existence of embodied connections with other people, things and thoughts.” (ibid:

172).

Territorialisation of Early Years Work

In our previous work (Kendall et al 2012) we have talked back to Osgood’s (Osgood

2006:4) question about recent workforce reform in the EYE sector “What does

'professionalism’ for this occupational group mean?” Here our conversation takes a

new turn. Here we want to think through these attempts to newly inscribe versions

of legitimate professional knowledge as examples of what Deleuze and Guattari

might call ‘territorialisation’ of the field of EYE by a state apparatus. By

territorialisation we mean the ‘capturing’ of territory to form striated space and


“fixed, recognizable meaning” (Jackson & Mazzei: 2012: 12). We explore this in

relation to making of knowledge and making of subjects, that is to say the knowing

about of early years work and the being of early years workers.

Knowing About

In previous work (Kendall et al 2012) we have plugged in Bourdieu’s ideas of

reproduction and distinction to explore the dominant discourses underpinning the

recent history of professionalisation in England. We described discourse

characterised by a commitment to skills, techniques, measurability, outcomes,

standards and certification through qualifications converging at the site of a

competent and rational humanist subject – the (in most cases female) early years

worker. We were drawn to Urban’s (2009) recognition of this version of

professionalism as a new paradigm within which professionals must be re-known, re-

shaped and disciplined and through which 'a maze of regulation, accountability,

universality and technocratic measurability' are legitimated in the name of 'quality'.

We noted, both in our own work and that of others, that similar arguments have

been made about the renegotiation of professional identities through the imposition

of cultures of instrumentalism (see for example Ball, 2003) in other sectors of

education (McDougall et al, 2006, Kendall & Herrington, 2009) or what Ball (2003)

calls the 'terrors of performativity'. Citing Apple (2004) Moss (2010) argues that this

is an outcome of a ‘new hegemonic bloc’ “of neo-liberals and neo-conservatives…the

former emphasising the relationship between education and the market, the latter

agreeing with the…emphasis on the economy but seeking stronger control over

knowledge, morals and values through curricula, testing and other means” (Moss

2010: 12).

For the purposes of our previous paper we emphasised a separation of newly known

‘professional’ forms of knowledge production, distribution and application, through

which the ‘new professional expert’ who embodies and reproduces (Moss, 2010: 15)

scientific knowledge to produce evidence-based or 'right' (good/best) practice comes

to be known (Urban, 2009) and distinguishable from the profane ‘yet to be


professionalised’ practitioner and their (un-legitimised) everyday knowledge which

might be re-cast as unskilled, non-professional and in the domain of the vernacular.

In Distinction Bourdieu (1986) understands this process of legitimising and

delegitimising or othering particular forms of knowledge as a process of

consecration. For Bourdieu the systems and practices of formal education and its

institutions are instrumental in this process as “the educational system defines non-

curricular culture (la culture ‘libre’), negatively at least, by delimiting, within

dominant culture, the area of what it puts into its syllabuses and controls by its

examinations,” (Bourdieu 2002:23) and through the technologies of curricula, Marx,

for example, argues of the examination that it “is nothing but the bureaucratic

baptism of knowledge, the official recognition of the transubstantiation of profane

knowledge into sacred knowledge” (Marx, K. cited in Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990:

92). In the modern context of professional education, and specifically the ‘re-

education’ of early years professionals (it is important to note here that the generic

label early years professional has been appropriated to name the new authorised

status of Early Years Professional or ‘EYP’) , the education system might be

understood more broadly to encompass the full range of agents acting on the

domain of professional learning such as sector skills councils (CWDC) and

qualification regulators such as FdF. Thus through Bourdieu’s lens we might interpret

recent policy-making in relation to early years professional education as key

movements in the ‘consecration’ of new knowledge regimes within this knowledge

field.

Urban (2009) argues that the system of professionalisation is constructed to create

an order of scarce resources, knowledge and skill that is presented as being general

but which is the manifestation of a particular and specific discourse. Drawing on

Foucault's notion of discourse as systematically constructing the forms and objects

of which it speaks, Urban understands this strategy as a way of asserting control over

individual behaviour towards making distinctions between forms of knowledge,

those who speak and those who are talked about, as well as where this talk happens

and the forms it takes. Thus knowledge construction belongs to the domain of


course designers, regulators and awarding bodies (for example those listed above)

and is ‘transferred’ to those who must put it into practice (a skilled workforce)

through programmes of vocational education. In the UK a range of structural

technologies serve to enforce and reinforce such understandings such as FdF

programme endorsements, Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) quality

gradings and workforce data returns at both local and national levels.

We suggested that logically extended this argument would imply that the ‘new

subjects/professionals’ would be doubly bound (internal and external regulation) to

index their professional identity to new knowledge relations, the “prevailing habitus

of Early Childhood Education” (Urban, 2008:135) and in so doing re-know, be re-

known and re-value (and de-value?) their pre-existing understandings of their own

practice and in turn their sense of their professional worth, status and identities.

‘Being’ an early years worker

Our recent readings of the literature suggest that the subjects of early years practice,

Early Years Students and Teachers (EYTs), represent a site of significant contestation

around which ideas about class, gender and agency are played out through

competing notions of the Early Years subject - particular kinds of subjects doing

particular kinds of activities.

Colley et al recognise this attunement to the ‘prevailing habitus’ discussed above as

‘vocational habitus’ (2003:489) by which they mean an active and agentive process

of orientation towards the dominant identities of the workplace. They describe by

way of example a habitus of ‘loving care’ to which students EYTs must orientate

themselves in both idealised and realised ways, “without aspiring to the idealized

habitus, students might become too harsh and the student may become ‘unsuitable’.

Without the tempering effects of the realized habitus, students might be

overwhelmed by the emotional demands of the work.” (2003: 489). Rejection of or

resistance to the vocational habitus is likely, they suggest, to result in exclusion.

Vocational habitus, they continue, “does encourage ‘a reflexive project of the self’


but…this project is often tightly bounded, both in relation to one’s existing habitus

and in accordance with a disciplinary discourse about the self one has to become.

The process of learning as becoming is one that is actively constructed by students,

but the possibilities are not boundless for most young people in VET [vocational

education and training]” (2003: 492). Elsewhere Colley contends that vocational

habitus in the early years is infused with a commitment to motherly love arguing

that in such conditions the education of early years workers is an act of “symbolic

violence…likely to continue as long as capitalist edubusiness has an interest in

making profits by offering motherly love for sale in the nursery”(2006:6). Skeggs has

argued that “the institutional organisation of the caring curriculum provides

frameworks, hierarchies and subject positions which bear specific ideological and

cultural meanings associated with femininity and household structures” (Skeggs,

1988:132) and that as a consequence take up of courses leading to caring

occupations such as early years work, is most likely to be by women. In her own

work Skeggs observed that many women “had previous experience of caring, either

through their own families, similar courses at school or through paid caring such as

babysitting...[and]...therefore feel caring is something they are capable of” (Skeggs

1988:138). Osgood (2005) suggests that a combination of this sort of notion of work-

of-the-home with a National Childcare strategy designed to enable women to re-

enter the labour market works to position childcare as “not ‘real’ work but a

mechanism to enable others to participate in careers that are afforded status,

prestige and relative wealth” (ibid, 290). This dimension to childcare work is, she

argues, largely absent from public debates.

However Osgood refuses to accede to the oppression of structuration, the regulatory

gaze, and draws on Francis’ (2001, cited in Osgood 2006) notion of ‘new agency’,

which “incorporates both deterministic structural arguments and human agency”

(ibid, 10) and contends that we are not only positioned within structures that are

beyond our control but also simultaneously positioning ourselves and others. This

complex dialectic, Osgood suggests, opens up space for alternative ways of

understanding identity construction within the context of an increasingly highly-

regularised working context. Drawing on Judith Butler’s (1990) notion of identity and


performance to describe a more active, agentive professionalism that is

performatively constructed. This reading allows her to recognize a mobile, strategic

ambitious and confident EYT who mobilises EY work advantageously to achieve

particular personal, social, economic and cultural functions. She notices “the self-

assured and wise ECEC professional who challenges the status quo…can muddy the

water and offer the chance of a reconfigured professional identity and counter-

discourse” (2006:12). Osgood’s analysis opens up the opportunity to imagine the

subversive worker able to confront and resist “prevailing and dominant

understandings of professionalism” (2006:14) towards a “transformative agency”

(ibid) that might imagine new possibilities for the being and doing of early years

work.

What emerged for us from our reading is the significance of the dialectic of structure

and agency to interpretations of early years workers’ experience, the constant push

and pull against which childcare becomes both “a site of agency and a site of

boundaries” for workers (Vincent and Braun 2010). What was obscured for us was

the entanglement of the writers in the being and doing of their work. Whilst we

glimpsed momentary surfacings of researchers “secret selves”

I related to the students in the classroom as a teacher, and in the nightclubs,

pubs, sports centres and homes, eventually as a friend. Sometimes I

participated, often I observed. Many interviews, individual and group, open

and closed were used. More often than not general conversations raised

interesting points. (Skeggs DATE: 133)

These material ‘I’s that wrote, interacted, saw, felt and noticed, were rapidly

obfuscated by the illusory yet seductive appeal of the systematic and scientific:

“indefinite triangulation” fixed the meaning tight and the authority of “the study”

replaced the fluidity of I.

In this respect empirical analysis provided the means for firstly, capturing the

structural and cultural phenomena at the level of everydayness (Apple,


1982); secondly, by researching the students within a college, the study was

able to analyse the structure and dynamics of the institutional parameters of

FE; (Skeggs Date: 133)

Resisting coding – feeling for hotspots in our material

Our empirical material yielded easily, passively even, to the dominant codes that

emerged through our reading. Over a lovely dinner at our writing retreat we were

able to count examples of, to us by now familiar (Kendall et al 2012), narratives of

mothers and grandmothers re-tracing the patterns drawn by Skeggs of moving

tentatively from private, un-paid caring responsibilities in to the casualised but more

formal context of ‘third sector’ voluntary work and finally in to the public sphere of

care as paid work. We were able to interpret the role of different actors, agents and

networks, personal, social and educational, that played in to our journeys of

‘becoming’, in Colley’s (2003), sense professional. And we recognised the familiar

contours of the structural barriers that seemed to frustrate or play against

aspiration, commitment and ambition – metaphors of physical barriers, walls,

staircases and caves standing in for institutions, classed and gendered positionings

and the intricacies and contingencies of everyday life, relationships and experience.

We were cheered by ladders, ropes and parachutes that we interpreted as

expressions of determination, movement and mobility facilitating moves between,

beyond and through, and forcing new perspectives on and new relations with people


and points of departure. We suggested at subjects and identities in transition, on the

move, in flux and told stories of progression, transformation and realisation of goals,

a playing out of the kind of dialectics discussed above; we were both positioned and

positioning at the site of early years work.

Maclure warns us however to be suspicious of coding. Coding, she reminds us

(2013:167) can offend on a number of accounts

“it positions the analyst at arms length…encouraging illusions of interpretive

dominion over an enclosed field, and making” 167

“researchers code; others get coded” 168

“coding assumes and imposes, an ‘arborescent’ or tree-like logic of

hierarchical, fixed relations among discrete entities…even it if it is not

displayed in the form of a tree diagram” it creates a grammar that “ always

pre-exists the phenomena under investigation” 167

She urges us instead to resist the “disciplinary rage for meaning” (ibid 170), to be

more open-ended and tentative in our sense-making and to heighten our

sensitivities towards ‘hot-spots’ in our data. “In place of the cerebral comforts of

ideas and concepts, or as well as these, we could acknowledge those uncomfortable

affects that swarm among our supposedly rational arguments, moments of nausea,

complacency, disgust, embarrassment, guilt, fear and fascination and threaten to

undo our certainty and self-certainty by, again, allowing bodily intensities to surge

up into thought and decision making” (172). These “gut feelings” she goes on “point

to the existence of embodied connections with other people, things and thoughts,

that are far more complex than the static connections of coding”. (ibid)

Here we want to describe and draw on two “hot-spots” in our material and how they

startled our thinking about professional education for EYTs.

The first was acknowledgement of our very visceral response to our own

entanglement in research processes. We no longer saw research as a “surface”


activity and described new sensitivities towards ‘the researched’, expressed by one

of us as “honour” and “respect”, that prompted a new disquiet about our own

positionality within the reading we’d done . We were in the words of one of our

colleagues “humbled” by listening to the sometimes “very intimate stories” of others

and interested in the differences as well as similarities in the stories we told. We

shared “phases of emotions” in our stories, visualised shades of light, dark and

colour in our own stories and noticed them in the stories of others. We were part

perplexed part stimulated by how “making and doing enabled stories to be shared

without just words”. We paused at length to consider the differences in telling

stories ‘cold’ through identity boxes, we’d come to this activity without advance

warning other than ‘bring a box’ to the session, and what we perceived as the more

measured, considered, rehearsed stories we told through the objects we’d selected

and charged as we made them with our projected meanings and those pressed and

infused by others. We wondered about the different kinds of performances we were

giving and the different reactions and responses (annoyance v honouring, respect v

mistrust) we had to them. For us, the physical, embodied, material experience of

telling our stories and listening to our stories opened up an important hot-spot, a

point of wonder in our material.

The second hot spot in our material was the description by one of us of what it felt

like to read Nutbrown’s A Box of Childhood. She’d read, enjoyed and felt she’d “got

it” but had begun to mistrust it’s worth and value because of its perceived

accessibility “if you read something hard you feel you’re reading something

academic…this felt less academic because it was easier to read”. It seemed like a

number of ideas were at play here about relationality, positionality but also about

the grappling nature of ‘becoming’ (again in Colley’s 2003 sense).

These hotspots marked points of departure in our conversation points at which we

wondered not what does academic professional education mean but what does it

do. How does it work with a sense of the rational/irrational and how does it make us

‘know’ and ‘feel’? What kind of ‘human’ subject (Briadotti REF) does it make of us?

We began to wonder how do contemporary discussions about EYTs – the what ‘they’


do, what ‘they’ know, how ‘they’ mean, that we have noticed in the literature – help

work, paradoxically in our view, the insulation in Bernstein’s (REF) sense, or perhaps

the refrain after Deleuze (REF), of reductive forms of professional education that

position EYTs as subjects caught up in a binary dialectic, exercising power or not.

What, we asked, if instead professional education stopped listening to conversations

and instead was constituted and constituting of conversation? A conversation that

we might imagine moving us beyond the dialectic of structure and agency towards

something more nebulous, entangled, flatter, in the Deluezian sense (REF XXX), and

provisional?

This conversation feels, at least for us, like nascent and difficult terrain that is at

times difficult to speak, at once formed and present but also elusive and difficult to

hold in our minds-EYS, the itch we can’t quite scratch, something like Lather’s

“stammering knowing” (1997:288) perhaps?

Lather’s discussion of religious and de-colonising methodologies catches our eye.

Citing Hardt and Negri (2000:128 in Lather 2006:44) She reminds us that the

“colonial world never really conformed to the simple two-part division of a

dialectical structure…reality always presents proliferating multiplicities…reality is not

dialectical, colonialism is”. She goes on to discuss the “god-centric epistemology” of

Daa’iyah Saleem which she reads as standing in for “the very tensions of (non-

containtment) of the discontinuous other, producing knowledge within and against

academic intelligibilities” (2006:41) and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s “cautionary tales…told

from an indigenous Maori perspective…through the eyes of the colonized” (2006:44)

against “Western ways of knowing” (ibid) and suggests that such efforts provide a

different kind of academic voice (2006:44). We began to wonder whether we might

read a similar sort of methodological colonialisation into the representations of EYTs

we’d encountered in our poking around in the literature, in this case a colonialising

representation of classed cultures. If so, how might the counter-task of

methodological de-colonialisation that Lather outlines be re-contextualised as a

pedagogical mandate for EYT professional education?


The task is to listen for the sense people make of their lives in order to attend

to how thinking gets organized into patterns, how discourses construct and

constitute with a sensitivity to issues of appropriation that does not revert to

romantic ‘too easy’ ideas about ‘authenticity’ in negotiating the tensions

between both honoring the ‘voices’ of research participants and the demand

for interpretive work on the part of the inquirer (2006:50)

The key she continues is to locate the researcher “within the context of the research

in a way that disrupts ‘subjective/objective’ binaries and accounts for the conditions

of its own production” (2006:51). She urges a radical proliferation in research

training that works against polar oppositions towards recognition of something like

Delueze’s “thousand tiny sexes” (2000). Such “nomadic conjunctions” she suggests

“produce fluid subjects, ambivalent and polyvalent, open to change, continually

being made, unmade and remade” (2006). A pedagogy framed in this way, we

argue, offers a very different way of understanding becoming, a becoming that is

always already in motion, fluid and in flux and quite different from Colley’s, perhaps

not linear but certainly rationally projected move from novice to professional. So

what might/could we imagine a pedagogy of movement and proliferation be like?

New departures for professional education?

We return to the ‘old wives stories’ to begin to sketch out what we might call a

paralogical pedagogy that is investigative, dynamic, generative, self-consciously and

reflexively interpretive and seeks out unintelligibility. A pedagogy of wonder

perhaps, after Maclure’s analytic practice that recognises itself as “just an

experiment with order and disorder, in which provisional and partial taxonomies are

formed but are always subject to change and metamorphosis as new connections

spark among words, bodies, objects and ideas” (2013:181).

- reflexivity about positionality


We start with an invitation to be reflexive about positionality and appropriate from

Literacy Studies the impulse of Gee’s Bill of Rights for “minority and poor children”

(2000:67). Gee’s ‘Bill’ seeks to “facilitate for students and teachers alike the

development of provisional models that help them to describe, observe and analyse

different literacies rather than just learning and teaching one literacy as given.”

(Street, 1997:54). Gee proposes reflexive and meta-awareness, critical framing and

the right to transform and produce knowledge as necessary strategies for socially

just forms of literacy education and we recognise here a productive schema for

forms of professional education that work against the grain of the molar machine.

For EY professional education this might mean describing and exploring both the Big

D (Gee 2011) stories, “the combination of language, actions, interactions, ways of

thinking, believing and valuing and using various symbols, tools and objects to enact

a particular sort of socially recognizable identity” (2011:201), that pattern the

becomings of EY workers and their ‘little d’ figured worlds, “their socially and

culturally constructed ways of recognising particular characters and actors and

actions and assigning them significance and value” (Gee 2011). We might want to

call this a ‘pedagogy of entanglement’ through which a commitment to the always

already of our somewhere-ness (see St Pierre above) nudges de-territorialisation of

the arborescent logic of professional orthodoxies towards a “rhizo-curriculum” that

acts as “a release point for thinking in new and imaginative ways” (Riddle 2013:12).

We offer up the story making and sharing we have engaged in throughout this

project, as practitioners, researchers and writers as a such a “release point”.

- Rhizo-curriculum, little stories of professional learning

We can begin to see that a pedagogy founded on this set of ideas might look quite

different to the practices and processes we’ve been used to. In contrast to the old

binaries of legitimate and illegitimate knowledge a rhizo-curriculum would commit

to having “lost its innocence and its faith in ‘victory narratives’” and recognise

instead “ that its truths are always partial and provisional, and that it can never fully

know or rescue the other.” (Maclure 2010:1). The rhizo-curriculum would be process

orientated, not focused on the study of authorised or legitimate texts as they


contribute to the arborescent orthodoxies of the professional discipline but

exploration and analysis of everyday entanglements with/in the field, a restless

mapping and re-mapping as Stewart explains

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) assert that the rhizome is ‘a map and not a

tracing’ (p. 12, emphasis in original). Tracings and reproductions, they argue,

are a part of all arborescent logic, and lead to codified complexes with closed

or fixed structures, whereas maps are open and connectable to other

dimensions. Maps, for Deleuze and Guattari, are ‘oriented toward

experimentation in contact with the real’ (p. 12). Maps are part of a rhizome

as they enable connections between fields, yet at the same time allow for

revision: ‘it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It

can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an

individual, group or social formation’ (p. 12). The map of Deleuze and

Guattari’s rhizome encourages thinking and thought that is ‘networked,

relational and transversal’ (Colman, 2005, p. 231). For Deleuze and Guattari

the very ‘fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and … and … and …”’

(p.25) (Stewart: 27)

We begin to see that the work of the teacher in this version of professional

education is not to teach about but to problematise, grapple, de-familiarise, unsettle

and undo - to enable students to work with/in the ruins towards new possibilities.

We want to propose the kind of auto-ethnographic story-telling we’ve engaged in

through this project as a useful strategy towards this ‘undone’ kind of curriculum. In

this dynamic the work of the teacher is to facilitate and scaffold learners auto-

ethnographic story-telling, and to accept and embrace the uncharted, as yet

unknowable learning spaces that emerge; learning spaces that, we assert, are

charged with productive possibility. Of course the idea of the teacher as facilitator is

not a new one. See for example the influential work of Knowles on ‘androgogy’

(1975). What is new in the rhizomatic turn is the objective of facilitation. Rather than

describable, learning in this dynamic becomes unpredictable, paralogical in Lyotard’s


terms, “a collection of ‘“petits ecrits”, little narratives, that resist closure and

totality” (Zembylas, 2000: 160). These little narratives are contrastingly less

ambitious than the grand old narratives of professional disciplines, but stress “the

particularity of events in our lives …particularity [that] makes impossible the

existence of an authority who can speak from a universal perspective without

invoking his or her ideology” (2000: 161).

Zembylas’s account of a paralogical science education offers a useful reference

point for imagining the conditions of the rhizo-curriculum. He argues that

in science children’s natural curiosity is ‘subordinated to logical forms’ (Zembylas,

2000: 161), and suggests that children can teach us ‘in their invitation to free

ourselves to speculate about the foundations of the universe as an infinite series of

alternate versions of experiences which never cease to amaze us’ (2000: 160).

Rather than something ‘naturalistic’, what we understand Zembylas to be

acknowledging is the plurality of story-telling as it deviates from “the conventions

of a Habermasian consensus. What this means for science education is a rejection

of what he calls a ‘persistent faith in the “force of the better argument”’ (2000:

166), in other words a rejection of the logocentrism of scientific knowledge

“which is always marked by the effects of status, power and influence” (2000: 166).

The alternative, paralogical science classroom might, in contrast, question ‘the very

context of argumentation, which is always marked by the effects of status, power,

and influence’, and ask ‘Who has the power in a classroom? Who is seen as the

legitimator of knowledge? What is the role of other ways of knowing such as

intuition, imagination and emotion?’ and how does the ‘the very nature of science

knowledge as taught through our textbooks as well as the evolution of modem

knowledge that calls for more specialisation exclude the subjective aspects of

teachers’ and children’s knowing’ (2000: 165)?

The account of a paralogical science education we see here calls for both an undoing,

of the normative mythologies that construct what we might call ‘subject

science’ and an invitation to invent new possibilities that are not: “pre-sented in our

current discourses. Legend, myth, history, science, intuition, and emotion share


common boundaries. Their domains oscillate into one another so that the idea of

ever distinguishing between them becomes more and more chimerical”

(Zembylas, 2000: 166).

Zembylas’s ideas here resonate with Maclure’s sketch of the baroque, an

approach to qualitative enquiry which seems pertinent to the kinds of ethnographic,

paralogical pedagogy we are outlining here, which resists the mastery discourses

that tend to characterise classroom-based paradigms of educational research.

Maclure’s baroque methodology favours a fragmented, dislocated undoing

characterised by movement over composure, estrangement of the familiar,

disorientation and loss of mastery (Maclure, 2006a: 8) towards a ‘frivolity’ (2006b)

that undoes and is undone. And it occurs to us that this type of approach might

usefully form the basis of a very different kind of professional learning that

seeks to reinscribe teacher/student relations and the subject/object of study

towards a seriously ‘frivolous’ or ‘baroque’ pedagogy, posturing ‘new imaginaries’

for the relation of the researcher to the object’, the becoming professional to the

professional field. We can imagine with Maclure a peepshow that:

brings the viewer into an intimate relation with the object, one into which

desire, wonder and otherness are folded, and out of which something might

issue that would never be seen by shining a bright light upon the object in the

empty space of reason and looking at it as hard as possible. But the

peepshow also calls attention to the compromised, voyeuristic nature of the

researcher gaze and the unavoidable absurdity of the research posture. To

view the delights of the peepshow you have to bend down, present your

backside to public view, put yourself at risk. (Maclure, 2006a: 18)

Towards concluding – lines of flight

Towards a conclusion we want to open up rather than close down our narrative, to

keep in our mind’s eye the possibility of lines of flight or “ ‘path[s] of mutation’

brought about by the production of connections between entities that previously


were implied; the result is a release of ‘new powers in the capacities of those bodies

to act and respond’ ” (Stewart 2012: 30). And so we depart with questions that

might be posed by a revaluation of professional education towards new forms of

pedagogical practice and an engagement with the event.

How did you come to be in this professional space?

What are the markers or ‘hot spots’ in your narrative?

How does your narrative compare to the narrative/s of others? What are the points

of difference? Consensus?

What does it mean to be a professional in your context? What is the difference

between a professional and a non-professional? Who decides?

How would you describe your experience in your professional context? What does it

look and sound and feel like? How does this compare with what you read about?

What different kinds of spaces, places and opportunities are there for making and

taking meanings about what it means to be professional in your area?

What does it mean to be a producer or consumer of meanings in these spaces and

places?

What different kinds of associations and affiliations do you make? With whom?

For what purposes?

What does it mean to be a rule-maker or rule-breaker in your professional

context/s?

Who or what does professional education serve in your context?


What different identities do you take up in different spaces and places? What role/s

do these perform? How are they similar? Competing?

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